Omakase — the Japanese equivalent of the tasting menu, which translates as “I’ll leave it up to you” — has been one of the biggest restaurant trends of the past 18 months. Yet in among the small plates of ikejime sea bass and charcoal-grilled wagyu being handed over impeccably buffed cedar counters in the capital’s smartest postcodes, one restaurant stands out for the uniqueness of its offering. Juno Omakase (2-4 Farmer Street, W8 7SN, losmochis.co.uk) in Notting Hill Gate, which opened in January, offers a hybrid of Mexican and Japanese cuisine. Or in the words of executive chef Leonard Tanyag: “Tokyo meets Tulum.”
Owner Markus Thelseff and Tanyag hit upon the culinary theme during the pandemic — in part because no one else was doing it, and in part because Mexican is the chef’s favourite style of food. Is that enough to launch a restaurant with? Probably not, but Tanyag has solid credentials. His family moved to Japan from the Philippines when he was seven and by the time he was 20, he had attained the position of sushi itamae, a skilled chef allowed to work on the sushi counter after three years training in izakaya and kaiseki restaurants.
Juno opened in December of last year, and by all accounts has been a hit. It may be unlike other omakase counters, but it seems Londoners have developed an insatiable appetite for Japanese food influenced by other cuisines.
At Juno, that means ingredients such as saboten hirame, or olive flounder, from Jeju island in South Korea, where the fish are fed cactus (“saboten” is the Japanese word for “cactus”). Or chicatana (ant) salt added to the nigiri. Just as at downstairs restaurant Los Mochis, and its soon-to-open City sibling (9th Floor, 100 Liverpool Street, EC2M 2AT, losmochis.co.uk), there are agave-based drinks pairings as well as saké. “It’s a fine balance of both Japanese and Mexican influences”, Tanyag says, “which are blended together to create the most stimulating flavours.”
While Mexican/Japanese mashups may be new to London, the mix of Japanese with the cuisines of its South American neighbours can be summed up in one word: Nobu (19 Old Park Lane, W1K 1LB, noburestaurants.com). The luxury lifestyle behemoth introduced London to Nikkei cuisine, the blend of Peruvian and Japanese flavours, on Park Lane in 1997, becoming as much an icon of Cool Britannia as Britpop and the Met Bar — and a total culture shock for anyone who thought Japanese cuisine only involved eating raw fish washed down with hot saké while sitting on a tatami mat on the floor.
There’s more to Nikkei than Nobu, however. Ayllu (25 Sheldon Square, W2 6EY, ayllu.co.uk) opened in 2021 by the canal in Paddington offering a fusion of Japanese and Peruvian cooking techniques: tacos filled with salmon, ceviche sushi rolls and yellowtail tiradito with olive-moscatel vinaigrette. There are DJs towards the end of the week and bottomless brunches at the weekend. Bartenders wear hachimaki headbands as they pour shots of pisco and while there’s no omakase, tasting menus sit alongside bento boxes and à la carte.
But without Nobu, there would be no Ayllu, no Zuma (5 Raphael Street, SW7 1DL, zumarestaurant.com) — and no Amazónico (10 Berkeley Square, W1J 6BR, amazonicorestaurant.com). True, the Latin American restaurant launched in Berkeley Square in 2019, where it is perfectly at home with its party-hard neighbours Sexy Fish and Bacchanalia. But as of this month, Amazónico is offering an, ahem, “Japazonico” menu, an express lunch including three courses of Nikkei-influenced nigiri, maki and poké (“Pokezonico’, if you please) for £38.
Amazónico’s group executive chef Vitelio Reyes says that the Latin spirit for the sushi comes from South American dressings, nuts and fruits in the likes of the roasted banana-miso cream used in the salmon nigiri, or mango, cocoa nibs and coconut aioli in the Amazónico maki.
Venezuelan-born Reyes has travelled extensively in Japan as well as his native South America. Why does he think that Japanese cooking lends itself to blending with other cuisines? “Japanese cuisine is so adaptable,” he says, “because in its original form it is very simple, but the few ingredients there are in each dish are very high quality. This allows chefs in the West to play around with extra flavours while always respecting the quality.
It’s a theory tested to the extreme at the new south London outpost of Freak Scene (1 Ramsden Road, SW12 8QX, freakscenerestaurants.com). Aussie founder Scott Hallsworth first found fame in the UK as head chef of Nobu before opening Kurobuta in Chelsea. At his new Balham joint (full name: Freak Scene Sushi and Robata) Hallsworth is grafting Singaporean flavours on to Japanese dishes in the likes of Singapore chilli crab maki. The Nobu classic of black cod, meanwhile, is given a miso and laska marinade.
Singapore was the first country Hallsworth worked in when he left Australia aged 19, but there are Thai influences here, too, in the likes of grilled pumpkin mochi, which he describes as “a hybrid between bread dough and mochi. We grill it, brush it with butter then top it off with a Thai mackerel preparation.”
He thinks South East Asian and Japanese flavours work together because both display high levels of umami. He’s not a fan of the term “Japanese fusion” — “but it does a decent job of explaining what’s going on. I sometimes say ‘westernised Japanese’. I feel that when you fuse or westernise Japanese techniques and ingredients, a very exciting and highly approachable experience is created. It’s like what the Rolling Stones did with classic blues riffs.”
I feel that when you westernise Japanese techniques and ingredients, a very exciting experience is created. It’s like what the Rolling Stones did with classic blues riffs
But perhaps the most interesting cuisine combos are coming from Japanese chefs themselves. Miho Sato is the UK’s only female sushi master, a perspective which gives her a freedom to play with tradition at the Aubrey (66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA, theaubreycollection.com), the swanky dining room at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park where she is head sushi chef. While the main menu is a pretty familiar run-down of contemporary Japanese in the Nobu/Zuma mould — wagyu tartare, hamachi tataki — there is arguably more interest to be found on the brunch menu.
“There’s such a demand in London for fusion food,” Sato says, “and although we wouldn’t call ourselves a fusion restaurant, the brunch menu was an opportunity to bring in French influences and classical patisserie — plus the combination of French and Japanese influences works so well together.”
Sato cites the brûléed shokupan from the matcha French toast, served with a yuzu crème Anglaise and compote, as a good example. “We make the shokupan bread in-house, and it also has a history that reflects Japanese and English culinary traditions coming together. Shokupan originally comes from a bakery in Yokohama that was founded by an Englishman in the 1800s.”
Sato says that she noticed that French and English chefs she worked with felt comfortable integrating Japanese products and ingredients into their cooking, even if the restaurants were not Japanese. Certainly, the precision one encounters in many two- and three-star Michelin restaurants is unmistakably Japanese, but it’s not all fine dining: recent Hackney opening Big Night (77 Morning Lane, E9 6LH, bignight.info) grills seasonal British produce — chicken and spring onion; lamb heart and kidney — on sticks, yakitori-style.
Might Japanese chefs return the compliment? Endo Kazutoshi is opening Kioku by Endo (6th floor, the OWO, Whitehall Place, SW1A 2BX, kiokubyendo.com) on the rooftop of the OWO hotel in May. Where the third-generation sushi master’s previous London restaurants — Endo at the Rotunda, Sumi and the recently launched Niju — have focussed on strictly Japanese cuisine, the food offering at Kioku will be what Kazutoshi describes as “Japanese with a touch of Mediterranean”.
When he was 29, Kazutoshi was asked by his sushi master to leave Yokohama and go and work in the Japanese embassy in Madrid. “I was initially devastated, but it led to where I am today, having influences from Mediterranean vegetables to olive oil and fresh fish,” he says. It was also in Spain where he met Rainer Becker, the founder of Zumu, who invited him to come and work in London.
Kioko is the Japanese word for “memory” and the food will reflect the chef’s time in both Japan and Spain, which sounds like a very London concept. Would it work in Japan? “Kioku will be known for the unexpected tastes and experiences which will be one of a kind,” Kazutoshi says. “Tokyo does have an influence on my culinary concept, however if Kioku were in Japan, locals would find the guest engagement unusual as my father, who was a sushi chef, didn’t speak. Just made the sushi. That’s typical of a Tokyo sushi chef.” Kioku, however, should be something to shout from the rooftops about.
